​Woman Volunteers to Be Her Own Mom's Surrogate & What a Family Tree It Creates!

Here's a family tree that might give you a headache. Ellen Brown has given birth to three children, but only one is referred to has her daughter. She gave birth to her now 17-year-old daughter Maddy, then acted as a surrogate for her mother and stepfather, and their twins Alex and Ruth are technically biologically Ellen's children. She's both mother and sister to the 12-year-old twins.

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Lost? Here's the breakdown, according to Daily Mail.

Ellen Brown's mother, Jenny, married now-husband Tony in 1999. Tony was 38 and Jenny was 49. She had undergone a hysterectomy years before and could no longer have children. So when Jenny and Tony approached Ellen about their idea to have children and mentioned they were looking to get a surrogate, Ellen stepped in.

"I said, 'Don't do that. Don't ask a stranger,'" Ellen told Daily Mail. "If they were going to have a baby, they might as well let me have one for them."

But because Jenny could no longer produce her own eggs, Ellen offered those as well. After a successful round of in-vitro, with her stepfather's sperm, Ellen found out she was pregnant with twins.

Now, the families live in two separate homes (Ellen and her daughter Maddy live together, and Jenny, Tony, Ruth, and Alex, live just 10 minutes down the road), and the family dynamic is no big deal.

But after sharing their story, the whole family is receiving tons of online comments and reactions. Some have been not-so-nice, and have referred to the family as "weird," but let's take a moment and acknowledge the woman for how amazing it was to do something like this for her mother. Surely, knowing the surrogate definitely gave Jenny peace of mind throughout the whole process. She knew (and gave birth to!) the woman who was carrying her children, entrusted her with such a precious task, and knew she was doing it out of love.

Between fertilization, pregnancy, official adoption, the journey could now have been easy. However, from the looks of things, they have managed to not only make it work, but have embraced their less-than-traditional family tree.